There were roughly 7.5 billion people on the planet he could safely ignore a call from at seven a.m and exactly two that he couldn't, so after he hung up the phone he threw on some pants while Rachel ruined his coffee in the kitchen. "Dad, just go back to bed," she sighed for the fifth time, sparing a tight-lipped look at him when he accidentally barked his hip off the corner of the table. "All this running around without sleep is really bad for your heart."

Starvation was also bad for his heart, so Richard course-corrected by appropriating Conan's toast just before the kid took his first bite. He crammed half of the slice in his mouth and eeled by Rachel, blinking sleep from his eyes, rescuing the pot from the burner before the contents critical-massed. "Of course, then I'm enabling you by making you coffee, which is also bad for your heart," Rachel muttered, setting two more slices of bread into the toaster and depressing the handle with a jerk. "So I guess both of us flunk this morning."

He spoke around a full mouth as he searched for a hotpad. "You actually looking for answers or just spouting off to the universe?"

"Just talking to myself as usual," Rachel said sweetly. She fetched his usual mug from the cupboard and shut the door, then banged the mug down unexpectedly atop the counter, which coincidentally brought him closer to cardiac arrest than his sleep deprivation. "I'm going to fix my hair," she said, again presumably to nobody, and left the kitchen with the toast still browning. Within moments the bathroom door crashed shut down the hall.

Richard counted a full twelve seconds of speeding violations before his heartbeat calmed. He chewed and swallowed his last mouthful, then said, "Now what did you do to her?"

"She has a test today she hasn't had time to study for." Conan had already slid off his stool and was stooping by his backpack to roll a spare sweatshirt into it. Richard caught a glimpse of what looked like a high school textbook and a gaudy pair of athletic shoes before Conan swiftly zipped it up. "Plus she hasn't exactly been getting a lot of sleep either. In case you hadn't noticed."

He'd noticed. More important was Conan's snotty assumption that he hadn't, which merited correctional force somewhere between tossing him out the window and lobbing a packet of soy sauce at his head.

Before Richard could decide which was more instructive, Conan had shouldered his backpack and started heading towards the kitchen door, checking his watch in transit. He clearly intended to leave for school ahead of Rachel. "Hold up, squirt." Richard finally located a hotpad in the cupboard adjacent to the stove and set the pot down on it, hissing when his knuckle brushed the glass. He cranked his head over his shoulder until he found Conan's gaze. "She's got toast in for you."

"I had toast already," Conan said sourly. "Somebody ate it."

"Rules of the animal kingdom: the strong get to eat first." The coffee looked potent enough to melt through the space-time continuum. Richard delayed death by searching for creamer in the refrigerator. "Just siddown and wait your turn."

"It's okay. I don't like toast anyway."

He located the creamer on the second shelf, shut the door, and crossed the room in two strides to snatch the kid up by the back of his jacket just before he scooted out of dodge. "Look, you go off without her and she'll blow another gasket, and I'm the one that has to listen to it," Richard said, depositing him back on the stool. "Just park until breakfast is ready."

"I don't like toast." Conan's face was a little splotchy – either anger or embarrassment at being handled. "And I can go to school by myself. I'm not a baby."

"Damn straight you're not, which is the only reason you're here backsassing me in my kitchen instead of getting left at the nearest fire station." Would this put him over? Richard craned his neck to look at the clock as he caught a slice of toast, calculating the equation of travel time equal to or greater than the fucks he gave.

In the end algebra lost to laziness. He relaxed his pace, stealing the second slice for himself and storing it between his teeth while he rummaged through the back of the spice cabinet. He could feel the intensity of Conan's glare tattooing middle fingers into his back as he worked himself out again, which did actually raise a few flags on the pole. He wasn't stupid enough to ever assume any of Conan's respect towards him was genuine, but most days Conan made an attempt to be likeable enough to fly under the radar. Something about this rare and open antagonism, like Conan was ready to burst through the bars and take his fellow inmates down with him in the revolt, felt more genuine than any smile the kid had given him in the past five weeks.

Richard decided to humor him. He chewed and swallowed the last of his own toast before hunting down the butter, scraping a layer onto Conan's slice and tossing the knife into the sink for Rachel to deal with later. He did pause long enough to check inside the bottle to make sure nothing had mutated over the past several years, but all in all sugar tended to stay apocalypse-proof.

He dumped on a generous coating over the butter, plopped it on a plate, and thrust it in Conan's direction. "No thanks," Conan said.

"Yeah thanks. Take it."

"What is it?"

"Toast. Take it."

"What did you put on it?"

"Rat poison and amphetamines. You want this in your mouth or on your head? Because one way or another it's not going to be in my hand in two seconds."

Conan took it. Charity work completed for the next four to six weeks, Richard turned back to the issue of his coffee. It still looked somewhere between an arctic oil spill and the stream he produced during a bladder infection, which actually did raise some survival-related questions. He could brew another pot, but at the end of the day, coffee had been invented to serve as fuel. Cars didn't care what was put into their tanks so long as it got them further down the road, so where did he get off being picky?

He stole a glance over his shoulder as he nabbed the creamer. Conan was still regarding the toast with the expression of someone who wasn't sure the venomous snake they were holding was completely dead. "Look, I'm not gonna kill you in my own kitchen," Richard said. "It's too much work to clean up the evidence."

"It could be something that kills me slowly, so I die in another, less incriminating spot."

"Which would still show up on the post-mortem screening, and what the hell kind of seven year-old uses the word 'incriminating'," Richard said. "Cops can screen for poison, idiot."

"It could be something that doesn't show up in toxicology. I saw it on TV."

"You wanna know what I saw on TV? Ads for kids' volunteer clean-up programs that'd have you picking up trash with a sharp stick all summer long. Quit being a pain in my ass and eat the toast."

Conan opened his mouth and shut it. He regarded the toast with the concentration of a scientist, turning it over in his hand a few times. When some of the powder fell off, he licked his forefinger and touched a smear of it on the plate, raising it to his mouth to test it. His eyebrows shot up.

Richard pretended not to watch him take a tentative bite off the corner. "This is… really good," Conan said slowly after he chewed and swallowed. He sounded cautiously surprised. "It's cinnamon-sugar, right?"

"Yeah."

"You had this just lying around?"

"Mixed it up a few years ago."

"You made it?"

The continued disbelief, like Richard was somehow incapable of finding two ingredients to mix together without the aid of a kitchen Sherpa, nearly made him introduce Conan to the window for the second time that morning. "You trying to start something?"

"Why do you always think I'm—" He heard Conan cut himself off with a quick, sharp breath of oxygenated Zen. "I was just surprised you had this lying around, okay? You have to admit it doesn't seem like the type of thing you'd usually… keep around. For you, I mean."

He'd be more interested in this conversation if he wasn't having so much trouble opening the cap on the carton of creamer. After a fourth failed attempt, Richard finally pulled his hand away to study it intently. "Did you used to make this for Rachel?" Conan asked from behind him, still vaguely in his sphere of concentration. "When she was a kid?"

He practiced the pinching motion and tried again. This time he managed to grip the cap long enough to turn it. "She never liked toast either," he muttered, distracted enough to answer honestly. He'd chalked his earlier tremor up to poor sleep or low blood sugar or both, but he'd nearly carved himself a new mouth trying to shave and getting the creamer into the mug was proving to be on par with neurosurgery, so evidently there was something else going on. "Camouflage helped."

"If she didn't like it, why not just buy something different?"

Richard's hand slipped, sending a trail of creamer over the side. Frustrated with himself, he snarled, "Here's an idea –why not just shut your trap for once in your life and be grateful for the free food you're taking from my real kid's mouth?"

The silence was titanic.

Richard swiped the towel from the oven handle to scrub at the spill. When he bent to catch the drip making a break for the lower cabinets, he was forced to brace himself on the counter when he realized the crawling nausea he felt in his intestines was guilt. It'd been so long since he'd felt an emotion that strong without a filter of a CNS depressant that his body had lost the ability to interpret it. He hurled the soiled towel back onto the counter and grabbed his coffee and tried to imagine a situation where a kid could show up that bruised and world-weary on his doorstep and not know how filling and cheap bread was, how fresh fruit and vegetables cost blood and no amount of pleading looks from his seven year-old daughter could buy her the expensive-ass cake she wanted in the shop window for her birthday.

Before he could break the silence – something not quite 'I'm sorry' but not exactly 'get out' either, Conan said, "Okay. I was just curious. I won't ask you that kind of stuff if you really don't want me to."

Richard didn't turn. He was on a fraying tightrope and a recoil could send him into space. "But for the record," Conan said, still in that bizarrely gentle, quiet tone that Richard knew for a fact wouldn't make it down the hall to the bathroom, "it's really kinda hard to ask me to trust you with the information you want when you never give up anything about you. Just saying."

Little pissant piece of shit. Richard took a drag on his mug and nearly combusted when another tremor knocked the scalding liquid over his upper lip. As if on cue, his own tension brought forth a sudden, hard twinge in his neck; fuming, Richard reached up to scrub the side of his fist along the encircling mark where Maya's wire had dug in. In his peripherals he saw Conan return to his toast, crunching noisily as though nothing at all had happened, leaving Richard to his own karmic stalemate.

Any plans he might've had to rectify the situation were derailed at the sound of the bathroom door opening again down the hall. Rachel re-entered the kitchen reeking of her curling iron and wearing the exact same hairdo she was sporting five minutes ago, once again proving that the money he vomited up at the electrical company was almost as pointless as sending actual vomit. "You made cinnamon toast?" Rachel blurted, instantly spotting the bottle on the counter. "Oh, come on, Dad, no fair!"

"Bottle's on the counter." Also whatever. He had things to do and ultimately that weirdness would have to wait on the to-do pile like everything else.

He stored his coffee mug inside the microwave because he was an asshole, then went to brush his teeth because he liked to be an asshole with fresh breath. "I'm bugging out," he reported, grabbing his jacket and keys from the back of the chair. "Lock up when you leave."

"Wait wait wait wait." Rachel had been fishing out a can of fruit juice from the refrigerator. She now straightened in a hurry, sprinting after him and catching his sleeve just as he breached the threshold. "What do you mean, 'bugging out'? You're just going downstairs to work in the office, aren't you?"

"Sure," he said. "If by 'downstairs' you mean 'outside' and by 'work in the office' you mean 'snag three hot dates before noon'. You still have your mother's number, right? I haven't pissed her off yet this week, so make sure and pass that along if she tells you she's thinking about coming back."

"Dad, would you please be serious for two seconds?" Rachel snapped. "Where are you really going?"

"Out. I've got things to do. Take your key with you, I don't know when I'll be back."

Rachel positioned herself squarely in front of him when he tried to wriggle past her. When he ducked she ducked, and he weaved and she weaved, and they continued the stupid dance until Rachel gave up and shoved him backwards over the threshold into the kitchen. "Look, I could ground you or whatever," Richard said, because most functional parents would probably do or say that after being manhandled by their offspring.

"If they're errands, why not just let me do them?" Rachel insisted. "I'll hit the store on the way home. Just make me a list like you usually do."

"I didn't make you a list because I'm not going to the store. Just drop it."

"What aren't you telling me? Why is it such a big secret?"

"It's not," Richard enunciated slowly, not so much trying to give her trouble as he was genuinely mystified by the fact that she was climbing up into his grill with an ice pick. "Look, just go to school or do whatever it is you usually do on a school day that you don't tell me about. All right? I'll see you when you get back."

Rachel seized his wrist as he once again tried to eel around her, and Richard was introduced to a technicolor galaxy of pain when his shoulder nearly popped right out of its goddamn socket. Okay. Richard spun on her to lend her a piece of his mind when she abruptly tackled him in a hug, whichactually was a pretty good strategy. It was one thing to upbraid your kid for their tantrum and another thing to do it when they were clinging to you like a scared cat. "Please, Dad." Rachel was muffled against his shoulder.

"What—" the hell. Truly baffled now, Richard gently tried to pry her off enough to get a look at her face. "Hon, seriously, what gives."

"Why don't you just stay around the office today like you always do? Whatever it is can't be that important. Let's just wait and do whatever you need to do after we get home from school. We can do it together. Like a… a family outing. Right, Conan?"

"Huh?" Clearly not invested whatsoever in the melodrama, Conan looked up with cheeks puffed with toast. "Wha?"

"That we can do together." Rachel pulled away of her own volition to fix Richard with round, expectant eyes. "Sound good, Dad?"

No it fucking didn't. Also what. Richard flailed around for an emotional buoy. Rachel's expression appeared composed, but the edges had gone pale, her nostrils flared in barely-suppressed anxiety.

Despite everything, Richard's mind stuttered and skipped backwards a bit at the sight of her distress. Was she still worried about… no, Yancy and Maya were behind bars. There was no chance of them getting out again after the enormous public outcry over the carelessness that allowed them to escape the first time. Rachel was rational enough to know that he wasn't in any more danger than he was yesterday or the week before that. Unless she was afraid someone would come after her?

That was probably the size of it, Richard realized. He generally shook off threats with the ease of someone who routinely drowned his worries in booze like fleas in a mop bucket. It hadn't occurred to him until now that Rachel might still actively be worried about retaliation from Yancy and Maya, but then again she hadn't had the years on the force he'd had to deal those hypothetical worries constructively.

In that moment, caught between a need to leave and a duty to stay, Richard felt a rare trickle of empathy. Bad enough she was stuck with him – she'd have even less success phoning up her mother, who was lousy at platitudes and impatient with paranoia. She'd been so harsh with Rachel over her fear of ghosts as a small child that Rachel had eventually bypassed her for comfort entirely, tiptoeing to Richard's side of the bed in the middle of the night and tugging on him silently until he woke. They're back, would be all she'd say, and he'd haul his stupid ornery exhausted cop ass out of bed to spray down her room with monster repellant and handcuff invisible assailants until she got bored with her fear and fell back asleep with a thumb in her mouth.

I can't chase away everything, kid. He extricated his arm but took her pointy face in his palm, and she reached up haltingly to settle her hand on his wrist. Sometimes it's just you against the world and you're all out of monster spray. "You think it's a good idea too, right, Dad?" Rachel pleaded, eyes on him.

"I think you're dangling over the edge like a spider about to run out of butt-silk," Richard said, but took her face in his other hand because he actually did give two fucks about this. "Rachel, look, you're gonna be fine. You're surrounded by people to and from school. Anyone bothers you, start kicking them in the crotch and don't stop until the cops get there to identify the body."

He heard Conan choke on his toast. As he'd hoped, Rachel flushed and regained some agency, smacking his hands away. "Dad,I'm being serious."

"Get it real good in there. Use your toe."

"Dad!"

"Just make sure to leave the teeth intact so they can run dental records," Richard told her over the sound of Conan's hacking. "When did this blushing damsel thing start, anyway? Did you lose a brawl at school or something? Do I need to come to school and dismantle some punk's clock?"

"Dad, I'm not worried about me," Rachel snapped. "I just don't think you should go out without backup for a while."

"Why not?"

"Because…" she floundered, the rallied hotly. "I just think it'd be better for you to lay low until everything is settled, and the media over the case dies down, that's all. Until there's… not so much attention on you."

Ohh. Richard finally relaxed. So he'd misread after all. She wasn't so much afraid of him drawing more mooks out of the woodwork as she was that he'd make an ass of himself again on national television and embarrass her at school.

In all fairness that was probably a pretty legitimate complaint. At any rate he was far more equipped to deal with that than he was to protect her from every splatter of past, present, and future fear she sauteéd up in her pan of paranoia.

He played his part. "Hey, who do you think you're talking to? Maybe you haven't heard it enough lately, but you just so happen to be the daughter of the famous detective Richard Moore, conqueror of assassins and conquistador of single ladies' hearts. Once I'm on a roll, I'm on a roll. There's nothing that can derail this man-train."

"Except three meters of wire," Conan muttered once he recovered, which actually did make Richard want to kill him kind of a lot. "Rachel, let's just go. Uncle's right. There's tons of pedestrians on the way there and back, and the school is safe. As long as we stick together, we'll be fine."

"Oh, Conan," Rachel sighed. She pushed away from them both and ran her hands through her hair. "I know. I know I'm being stupid. Maya and Yancy are behind bars. I just… I get so worried, and I just…"

"Are you worried about me?" Conan set his empty plate on the shelf and hopped off the stool, stumbling a bit on impact as though he'd miscalculated the distance to the floor. He recovered quickly and jogged across the room, shouldering his backpack before offering his hand up to Rachel. "Here I am! I was just pretending to be brave earlier. I'd be sooo scared if I wasn't with you, Rachel. Would it be okay if you protected me?"

"You—" Richard's eyeballs nearly took a vacation from their sockets at the blatant emotional manipulation. "Now listen, you little—"

"I mean, you're a karate champion, right?" Conan's eyes were wide and earnest on a cherubic face. "There's no way you'd ever let anything get me while you're there. You're way too tough."

Rachel's expression softened. She took a knee to get eye-level and firmly took Conan's hand in hers. "That's right," she said. "Nothing's getting between you and me, Conan."

"'Cuz you'd karate-chop them, right?"

"To tiny bits."

"Really tiny bits?"

"To dust."

"Whew!" Conan laughed. "Gee, I sure feel safe now. Hey, can we go to school now? I promised Amy I'd help her with her math before the bell rings and I sure don't want to be late."

"Then I guess we better get going." Rachel stood. Even in Richard's irritation he noticed that she didn't let go of Conan's hand, sliding her school bag from the counter with her free hand and glancing at the clock in passing. "Shoot, I didn't get around to packing a lunch last night. I guess I'll just buy some bread before class."

"Do you have money?" Conan was already digging in his pocket as they walked. "Here, why don't you take some of mine? I've got some leftover from yesterday. We can share."

"You are not giving me your lunch money, young man." A tremor of laughter undercut Rachel's severity. "Honestly, you're such a little worrywart. If you have extra, why not save it? Or better yet, why not use it to buy your little friends something?"

"Because they'll just take it and waste it all at the arcade later. I learn from my mistakes, thanks."

"Really? Are you sure? Because I'd bet Amy would be reaaallyhappy to get something from you."

"It's not like that," was Conan's fading protest, and a moment later the door to the stairs shut with a click, plunging the apartment into silence.

Richard stood in the center of the kitchen and tried to map out the exact point where Rachel had forgotten his existence in favor of latching onto Conan with the single-minded thirst of a wood tick. He had been almost one hundred percent sure he'd been doing halfway decent parenting that morning. She hadn't even looked over her shoulder at him as she'd left. He couldn't even remember the last time she'd—

A warning fluttered in his stomach. Suddenly dizzy again, Richard braced himself over the sink with both hands and closed his eyes and hated everything for a while, hated himself expertly and viscerally, until his defense mechanisms engaged and shelved everything he hated back into bottle-sized compartments, and gradually there came to be enough room inside his own chest for his lungs to expand again, to take in and then reject the same air.

When he could move again without stabbing something into the electrical socket, he straightened from the sink and made for the door.

.

He stopped by the convenience store before catching the bus on the last leg of the journey, opting to carry the snacks in an overstuffed pocket rather than fuss with a bag. Now that Beika was turning the corner towards the rainy season, the skies between the high-rises had a gun-metal glint that promised frequent inconvenience for anybody venturing outside without an umbrella.

By the time he'd made it downtown, the clouds had sneezed on him twice and the newspaper he'd ponied up for had ceased to function as a rain hat. He cleaned himself up in a coffee shop bathroom down the street, flirted outrageously until the blushing barista agreed to brew him a fresh pot, then scalded the fuck out of his tongue in order to finish it outside before he climbed the stairs to the station.

The police station was an epicenter of activity this time of morning, redolent of fresh coffee and the cleansers the janitors had used during last night's third shift. Richard spent a few minutes resenting his visitor's tag and wrestling back the urge to sneeze, feeling his now-warm stomach trying and failing to energize the sludge of blood in his cold limbs.

Meguire was sitting behind his desk when Richard came through the door to his office. He was listening intently into the phone receiver, lips quirked in a frown, fixating on the desk before him. His hard gaze flitted up when Richard knocked a knuckle on the doorframe; he mouthed sorry and flicked his fingers in vague welcome toward the chair across from him.

Richard shut the door behind him with his heel. Fingertips prickling with slowly-returning warmth, he dug one of the packages of Krunky Wafers out of his pocket and tossed it ahead of him as he crossed the room. With barely a glance upward Meguire reached up to catch it one-handed, turning it over to check the label. A grin broke out over his face. "No, we understand," he said into the phone. He kicked himself back a bit and dug into his left-hand drawer; a moment later he surfaced with a package of Morinaga caramels that he slid across the desk. Pleased, Richard intercepted it and threw himself into the chair, picking an unoccupied corner of the desk to plop his heels up on. "And I can appreciate the disruption to your evenings, ma'am," Meguire said. "We're pretty familiar with that corner. I think it's probably an honest misunderstanding, but we'll check it out."

Richard's entire world was focused on opening the caramel's foil package like someone who wasn't a total dick. Already uncooperative to begin with, his cold fingers now fumbled over the tiny twists on each ends, fingertips skidding off the slippery material. By the time the twists finally surrendered and he was able to strip off the wrapping, he was tense enough with frustration that he fumbled the unwrapped caramel onto the dirt-streaked floor.

Meguire's hand shifted to cover the bottom of the receiver in time to muffle the hissed string of curses. He leaned back to access his drawer again and this time emerged with a bottled water. He peeled his palm off the receiver enough to say, "I understand," and plopped the bottle down in front of Richard with his other hand, crooking his fingers impatiently.

Richard shoved the bag of caramels over and took up the water instead. He downed a few medicinal swigs, swishing it over the burnt patch on his tongue as Meguire worked a caramel open with one-handed dexterity across the desk. "And I'm sorry for that," Meguire said, thrusting the unwrapped caramel into Richard's hand. A few seconds later a hard ball of foil flew to sting Richard between the eyes. "I can assure you that we'll look into it."

Richard shamelessly popped the caramel into his mouth and got to work on a second helping. Outside the window, a brief break in the clouds sent a tumble of sunlight into the room behind Meguire's desk, illuminating a shaft of dust motes. "You look like reheated roadkill," Meguire said when he finally hung up. "How many hours you running on?"

"More than you." The sugar in the caramel was helping to equalize something. Richard chewed as he pondered this development, untwisting the right side of the package with a slightly steadier hand. "What was all that?"

"Some skirt complaining about a neighbor's fussy dog on Third Avenue. She's a big annual donor at the police ball and apparently one of the grunts here blew her off last time, so she got wired over to me."

"That's the area with all the three story mansions packed up against the street, right? Usually all you get over there are stray cats setting off security systems."

"I guess the noise has been pretty egregious." Meguire snapped off a yawn with a grunt as he nudged the drawer by his knee closed. "I'll fling an officer out there this afternoon to see what's going on."

It had nothing to do with him and about ninety-six percent of his attention was invested in candy chews at the moment, but a greyed-out area of Richard's memory sent up a signal flare.

His chewing slowed. After he swallowed he said, "Deep bark?"

"She said it sounded like it was coming from a large dog." But Meguire filed one of the folders away and shot him a shrewd look. "Sounds like you know what's up. You saving me a trip?"

Third Avenue. Richard managed to peel the second wrapper off and toss it towards the trash. "She didn't happen to say it was coming from the Peterson's, did she?"

"Didn't drop any names. Why? You know them?"

"Rachel used to play with a German Shepherd over there when she was a kid. She still visits every now and then. Thing'd have to be almost eleven years old by now."

"Probably not the same dog," Meguire said. "All of those houses have yards big enough to park a yacht in. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them decided to breed a team of sled dogs to help them get to the mailbox. Don't bend any brain cells on this, Moore. Just a rich woman with a noise complaint."

Huh. Richard popped the next caramel in his mouth, chewed a while, and rolled the whole thing off his shoulders. "All right, let's get down to it." Meguire took a swig of coffee from his mug before unearthing a dog-eared manila folder and plopping it down between them. The printed label on the tab read YANCY, but handwritten scribbles underneath included a slew of further names and dates, with an all-capital addition on the bottom reading YANCY/REARDON/MOORE; REVISIT AND REFILE, INVESTIGATION ONGOING. Meguire dug into his package of Krunky Wafers and stored one between his teeth like a cigar as he fished around his desk for a pen.

When he appeared settled, he took the wafer from his mouth and announced presently, "Okay, shoot."

For the next twenty minutes Richard recounted all the details he could scrounge up leading to Yancy's and Maya's arrest, including a recap of the original case that'd put Yancy behind bars. Meguire remained quiet and nonjudgmental throughout, scribbling with shorthand and occasionally flipping to other documents in the file to add footnotes. He spoke up only a handful of times to clarify details that Richard glossed over, but for the most part Richard's report lined up with the statement he'd given at the scene. "You know, there is one thing that kind of sticks in my craw," Richard said at the end. "I mean, we'd spent the whole day pounding the pavement to help her. Free of charge. Got her to the hospital, escorted her around town, paid for her bus fare… who knows, without our help, she may never have gotten her memory back. You'd think she'd be grateful or something."

"Probably had nothing to do with you, Moore," Meguire said, scribbling down the last note before tossing the pen atop the paperwork with a sigh. He sounded tired but unusually tolerant, twisting to access his supply drawer again. He plucked Richard's empty water bottle from him and deposited a new one in front of him in the same motion. "Just business."

"'Didn't I deserve a little karmic credit? I mean, she didn't even hesitate to try and kill me after all I did for her."

"Why should she? You were a mark and she'd already been paid. You meant nothing but a stack of bills to her, Richard."

"Maybe the problem here is that you're not giving me enough credit," Richard said, mostly because he'd been Meguire's partner for too long to be fooled by the pointed cruelty. Meguire was on edge for him and was likely seeking to reduce Richard's role in the upcoming trial as much as possible, which would be rendered exponentially more difficult the more invested Richard became in deducing Maya's cup size. "For a woman who was supposed to be a professional assassin, she gave up prettyfast once the kids came on the scene. Personally, I think she'd fallen for me by that point and was looking for an excuse to tap out."

"Yeah, speaking of which." Meguire had swept up the pen again to earmark the pages. He paused and looked up now, gaze zeroing in on him. "Didn't want to interrupt your train of thought earlier, but we need to backtrack. You said something came out of the dark and hit her, right? Some kind of projectile?"

"Probably."

"What do you mean probably."

"I don't know, I was busy. Ask Geppetto, she was the one yanking my strings."

"We did ask Geppetto, and now that you're off her strings you can be a big boy and answer my questions all by yourself," Meguire said. "Need you to dig deep and pull out every detail you can after the attack. It's important."

Having delivered his bit and being only mildly invested at this point, Richard stifled a yawn and bypassed the water to steal another caramel. His rain-damp collar kept brushing against his neck, giving him unpleasant little licks whenever he turned his chin. "Why."

"Because I asked you nicely."

"Look, Inspector, isn't this small potatoes? You already got the confession, the weapon, the motive, and proof the crime was premeditated. Shouldn't I at least be able to get in on the department's vision and dental package before I pony up any more work for free?"

"Rachel said you were awake when she got to you." Meguire didn't lobby back the antagonism. "You remember seeing or hearing anything unusual before then?"

"I don't know."

"Try harder. You were conscious enough to remember Maya dropping you, which meant you couldn't have been up there much more than thirty seconds. You said Conan came onto the scene right after that."

"I don't know. It happened fast, it was dark, I was dying. It's all scrambled together."

"Then take whatever time you need to unscramble it. I got nowhere else to be right now, Richard," Meguire said. "This time is blocked off for you. Just take a few minutes, think back. Anything you got, even if you think it means nothing."

Richard's chewing slowed to a stop as he finally cued into Meguire's tone. The questioning had taken on a timbre that he recognized from their days back on the force: calm and patient, almost gentle, every rough edge smoothed away so the direct attention soothed rather than scraped. It was the same tone Meguire used to coax witness statements from terrified children and hysterical drunk teenage girls. "I don't have anything for you."

"Think harder."

Suddenly and undeservedly irritated, Richard returned to the water bottle and broke the seal on the cap with a crack as rude as a curse. Think harder. He had been thinking. He'd done nothing but think for sixteen hours, too wired for alcohol and too short of breath to smoke. He'd knicked so many patches shaving that morning the sink had looked like a trench in the battle of Leipzig.

"Hey." Meguire had softened on the edge of Richard's periphery, and Richard realized he'd been gripping the water bottle hard enough to make it crackle. "It's all right. Just take your time."

"Quit handling me," Richard snapped. He took an unsteady swig of water to quiet his nausea. "I'm not traumatized, I just don't have what you want."

"I'm not handling you, I'm trying to pry a witness statement from your stubborn ass without contributing to your laundry list of psychological damage," Meguire said. "I've got conflicting reports from three different parties. Maya, Conan, Rachel, they all say they saw something different. You were the only one there the whole time who can confirm their stories, so – yeah, Richard, you know what, I guess I am handling you. I'm trying to dig deep and not draw blood doing it."

"You secured a confession already, why does this matter?"

"When we questioned him on the scene, Conan said that he threw some debris to distract her and she accidentally dropped you. But when Rachel got there, she said Maya was on the ground because she was too injured to get up to finish the job."

"Probably just fell on her."

"Which'd be fine, except the witness statements don't corroborate the evidence," Meguire said. "Maya said you were heavier than she'd expected and you fought back so hard that she lost her grip on you. No mention of a projectile or Conan. When we pushed her on it, she said she didn't get up to finish the job because she didn't want to off you in front of your kids."

"Fine, then that's what happened."

"Damn it, Richard, you're not this stupid," Meguire said. "She's a professional – in the business for years. She had your full dossier in that drawer, you think she didn't know your weight down to the gram ahead of time? Even if she somehow screwed that up, your neck and her hands would be sliced to ribbons if you'd actually fought her hard enough to make her drop you, and that ain't even pulling in the physics of it."

"Fine, then she's full of crap," Richard said. "I don't get what you're after."

"You want to know what I'm after?" Meguire exploded suddenly, slamming his pen down. "I'm trying to get you to give a damn about the fact someone tried to kill you the other day. I'm trying to scrape up enough evidence to punish the person who wanted you dead. You were attacked by an assassin, the police showed up a few minutes later, and the time between those two events is a giant goddamn brick wall directly up my snagged you in the middle of that room, Moore. Nothing for you to pull on, push off, or drag yourself up or down with. Medical said she had four cracked ribs – no damage to her hands to show that you fought her. Something hit her with the force of a battering ram and only Conan was around to see it happen, and he's clammed up tighter than a nun. No seven year-old can throw a projectile with that much force, and Rachel said she didn't do it, so what I'm after is how the hell you're lucky enough to be alive right now when by all accounts we should've been too late."

A curt rap rattled the glass on the door behind him. Stunned into speechlessness, hand frozen atop the next caramel, Richard pried his gaze away in time to see a woman from Meguire's team poke her head into the office. Kay gave Richard an expert once-over before directing her brisk, tight-lipped smile over to Meguire. "It's fine," Meguire muttered, almost sullen, sweeping wafer crumbs and empty candy wrappers towards the trash can. His ire had died the moment she'd come in. "He's not bleeding."

"I'd never suggest something so disrespectful, sir." Kay's cheerful voice held a touch of flint. Richard recognized it as the same sweet tone his wife used to course-correct his conduct in front of guests instead of ripping him a new asshole and leaving him to bleed out in a dense forest. "I was just checking to see if you or the civilian witness you're questioning would like some tea to drink."

"No thank you."

"Sorry, I should've known you'd have no need for that. The whole team admires what a level head you keep even in tense situations, like when a civilian victim of a violent assault is giving a witness statement here at the police station, where we protect civilians."

Meguire propped his elbows on the desk and hid his face in his hands. "Got it."

"I just wanted to tell you how happy I am to hear, sir, clear down the hallway and all the way up to the front desk, how enthusiastic you are about our oath to serve and protect civilians."

Meguire's face sank further against the tent of his fingertips. "Got it."

Kay hoisted the blinds all the way to the top of the door's window. She made sure the latch was unlocked, gave Richard a sunny smile, and closed the door behind her. The wedge of rolled-up blinds clacked against the glass before the room fell into silence once more.

The sweetness of the caramel abruptly became cloying. Richard drew his hand away and took up his water instead, collecting a mouthful and swishing it between his teeth to try to dislodge the crust of sugar. Across the desk, Meguire continued his steady collapse inward, shoulders hunching, thumbs massaging his eyebrows and blocking his expression from view. The posture radiated fatigue.

Suddenly subdued, Richard fixed his gaze on the bottle in his hands. There'd actually been a point in fairly recent history that it wouldn't have occurred to him to care about the inconvenience he was causing the department. Richard had been a licensed distributor of Grade-A unsalted horseshit for years. Karmic retribution was a given. As long as he could tuck his trauma in at night with a blanket of liquor and a wish upon a fuck-off star, the issue of whether the pain was actually fair or not was really beside the point. If he dealt it, he needed to be able to take it.

The problem was, Richard realized slowly, digging in a thumb until the water inside the bottle crept up around the indentation — the problem was, the pain from Maya's betrayal wasn't karmic. It was scented and softer and more invasive, creeping in with the nihilism that spidered all over him when he lay in bed after a binge. Had he tried to take advantage in some way, any way, he'd have deserved what'd gone down that night. Genuinely doing his best to help someone in need and getting the exact same result… that was different. It hurt differently.

Some rusty gear in his head finally clucked forward a notch. Richard blinked at the bottle, letting his mind travel back through the mire, plucking out glints of incidental light. Gravel under his heel. The silvery note of the wire as it cinched around his neck. This is different. This was pain he hadn't earned.

Meguire was slowly massaging his eyebrows across the desk. "I—" Richard stopped. He thumbed his own forehead a minute, trying to bum-rush his thought process through his headache. The improbable strength in Maya's delicate arms as she hoisted him off the ground. Thick cobwebs. Steel support beams. "Now that I think about it, maybe there was something else."

Meguire kept silent, but one of his hands pulled away from his face, finding his pen. "I don't think she was hurt before she roped me." Richard kept the scene on loop in his head. "Nothing wrong with her at the hospital other than the amnesia – they'll have records on it. And she rolled right back up after she dodged the car, not a scratch. The hotel should've caught it on surveillance. She used her weight to pull me up at the warehouse, but she kept a good stance after she did it. She couldn't have done that with busted ribs. I was already out of breath chasing her, so I didn't have much left to fight her with."

Meguire had muted his presence to the whisper of his pen across the paper. Richard lost himself in the refracted colors in the water bottle, flinging his net as far out over the sea of his disjointed memories as it'd go for free. "I was almost out when she dropped me. Didn't see a projectile, but I was in the middle of the room – she had to cop a wide angle to have the leverage to hold me. No way I fell on her. Someone had to have thrown something."

Meguire finally did stir at this, but very quietly. "Conan?"

"He was the first one there, but there's no way he could've thrown anything with that much force."

"How about kicking something? Was there anything around he could've used?"

"No seven year-old kicks hard enough to blow out four ribs unless he's a magical girl."

"Lot of debris. A good chunk of concrete could've done a lot of damage, even thrown by a kid."

Maybe. It was plausible but it wasn't. There was something he was missing. "Which hotel?" Meguire said, reaching for the phone.

"Grand Hotel on Main."

Meguire put in the call.

His daughter's screams. His heartbeat slowing in his ears as he swung above an abyss three feet under his shoes. Impact. The taste of blood. Policemen standing over him. Conan on his knees, cold little fingers grazing Richard's neck as he quickly searched for any remnants of wire.

Richard froze, replaying the scene with fresh eyes. Rachel had clung like carpet lint to him afterwards, refusing to submit to questioning until the medics had cleared him. Conan had taken a wider orbit, handling the lion's share of the witness statement, but his gaze had kept flitting over to keep track of them as the cluster of cops and reporters had thickened. The more Richard thought about it, the more he recognized Rachel's strange behavior that morning as being an echo of her hysteria at the crime scene.

She wasn't worried for herself or Conan, Richard realized, dumbfounded. She was afraid for him. And Conan… he'd actually talked to Maya, hadn't he? Not long enough to get himself garroted, but plenty long enough for her to knock him off-kilter in other, more insidious ways. Maybe enough for him to nearly blow his cover over something as asinine as a piece of stolen toast. "I'm gonna be straight with you," Meguire said as he hung up the phone. "The prosecution's got their work cut out for them on this one. I can't tell you one way or another how this is all gonna play out."

Buried somewhere underneath the rest of it, sardonic and blurred with pain as the sirens closed in: you're a force to be reckoned with, little man. "You in there?" Meguire said.

Richard blinked his way out of his daze. "The judicial system's gonna take it easy on her because she's young and pretty and knows how to cry without running her mascara," Meguire said. "The reason I'm yanking so hard for your statement is because more than likely, her lawyer's going to claim she wasn't actually trying to kill you."

"Really?"

"It's a long shot, but it's got roots," Meguire said. "Because no one'll pony up as to how exactly she got hurt, there's no proof Conan or Rachel or anyone else threw something to knock her off-balance enough to drop you. Any lawyer worth a damn is going to play that up for all they've got. Hundred to one they argue that she had a crisis of conscience and let you go at the last minute – maybe use the 'nurturing female' angle and say that she didn't want to kill you in front of your kid."

"He's not my—"

"I don't care, shut up," Meguire said. "Worst case scenario, the lawyer claims you assaulted her, and she broke out her wire in self-defense to get you to stop chasing her. That's more far-fetched considering her criminal past, but it's not completely out of the ballpark."

Oh. Richard's head still hurt and the buzz from his coffee had long worn off. He also had an increasing urge to pee that was encroaching upon the gravity of the conversation. "Luckily," Meguire said, "it seems like Maya's connection with Yancy's gonna be the thing that dooms her in the end. They're both ratting on each other enough that your case might end up being just a drop in the bucket."

"Then what was the point of this?" Richard asked, freshly irritated to be out of bed with a bladder full of distilled non-alcoholic beverages. "If that's all this'll come down to, you already had everything you needed from me back at the crime scene."

"On the assumption that I don't care enough about you to make sure your would-be murderer can't get at you again? I guess nothing, dipshit," Meguire said. "Or if you want to look at the legal angle, I owe it to the courts to make sure the list of her crimes is comprehensive enough that they can get the whole picture when sentencing her. She didn't actually off you, so now we got a grey area for the defense to exploit."

"If it makes things easier, you can always let her out and have her try again." Either way he'd checked out of the conversation. Richard officially devoted his concentration to more pressing matters, like whether or not to pocket a modest handful of caramels or take off with the entire bag as payment for services rendered. "Hopefully next time she gets it right and leaves more evidence for the department to work with."

Meguire had picked the pen back up to start dating the entries. He paused at this, scratching the back of his ear slowly with the capped end.

When he spoke it was sudden and resigned. "So you're just gonna leave that floating there?"

"What."

"That was a cry for help, Dick."

"Huh?" Richard froze with a fistful of caramels. "No it wasn't."

"It sure as hell was and it wasn't the first one, so if your plan isn't for me to interpret it that way, I'd suggest amending it real quick."

"I wasn't—" Richard resisted the urge to prove Meguire's point by drowning himself in the remaining four centimeters of water in his bottle. "I was joking."

"Oh yeah?"

"It was a joke."

"Don't hand me those kinds of jokes unless you want me to do something about them." Meguire scribbled down a handful of signatures, then thrust the documents across the desk to Richard and tossed the pen after them. "This. This is a joke. How the hell do we even file this. I'm gonna have to start sending fruit baskets down to Personnel."

"You think you're maybe sounding off in the wrong direction?" Richard activated his professionalism long enough to give the documents a once-over before committing his signatures to them. "Kudo's rubbernecked over half of Beika's crime scenes and I don't see you dragging him in here to henpeck his ear off over it."

"I would if anyone could find him," Meguire said grimly, which did take the wind out of Richard's sails a little. "But even if I could get my hands on him, the kid isn't a veteran of the department, a component in an internal investigation, a police consultant, and a victim of multiple assaults at the same time. You're your own pain in the ass, Richard."

"Am I a rich pain in the ass?" His spring of optimism made a quick detour in from his sea of eternal pessimism. Meguire looked tired but not especially irritated, which usually meant he could at least be plied to foot the bill for some takeout. "I did help you guys catch a dangerous criminal assassin. There's some sort of bonus for that, right?"

Meguire collected the assembly of crumpled-up wrappers in lieu of a response. When Richard was done signing his last initial, Meguire stole the pile and filed it all back into its dog-eared folder, which he then locked into the drawer by his knee. Business apparently concluded, he heaved himself up with a sigh, cricked his spine, and fished his jacket up from the back of his chair. "Let's get you out of here before we start running into the lunch rush. We can leave out back."

Already seeking out a third handful of caramels and mostly expecting dismissal via catapult at this point, Richard blinked up at him. "You're loaning me a squad car?"

"Driving you home. C'mon."

"You're working."

"Already scheduled this in. Figured whatever night you were coming off of didn't need two stints on public transportation to top it off."

As it always did, the kindness abruptly exhausted him. Richard released the caramels and instead dedicated a minute to scrub his eyes as his bladder whined at him with knives. "This was a rough one, Moore," Meguire said. "Got my own hackles up, if I'm gonna be honest."

It wasn't a question. "Eva called you."

"Your kid did, 'bout twenty minutes before you came in. Wanted to check to see if you got here."

How did she even— He dropped his hand and hovered between mystified and murderous. "I told her to get off my back."

"Didn't say it was Rachel."

The anger faded into something a little colder, a little more sinuous. Richard drummed the side of his thumb against the desk restlessly. "C'mon." Meguire didn't wait for him to sort it out. He dug his keys from his pocket and tossed a caramel at Richard in passing, who caught it with his ear. "Stew all you want at home, but at least give me the peace of mind to know I didn't let you ferment in a bar on the way there."

.

Richard managed to make it all the way through a restaurant take-out line and escape out the car in front of the agency before Meguire said, "One more thing."

"Look, this isn't going to be one of those dramatic last-minute stingers that keep me up all night, is it?" Richard asked, bracing a reluctant hand atop the car to get eye-level. "Just split some of the take-out with me and give me a running start while you chew."

"This case put Conan back on the radar at the department. I've tried to keep it quiet, but noses sharper than mine have started sniffing around it. It's probably only a matter of time before the department starts spending resources on it."

"Are they putting snipers on it too? I know where he sleeps."

"Dunno how much longer he's got, Moore," Meguire said simply. "He was safe with you and Agasa vouched for his identity, so other cases took priority, but the more of this kind of stuff he gets mixed up in, the more questions are gonna get asked."

His takeout was getting cold. Propped against the car with a still-damp jacket and a tickle climbing up his nose, Richard found himself wishing that congealed teriyaki sauce was the only thing life had served him today atop the usual pile of steamed bullshit. "So what."

"You and I both know it takes something pretty screwy to drive a seven year-old into hiding. Keeping him safe was enough for a while, but sooner or later the truth's gotta come out. He's on borrowed time."

"So what."

"Don't give me so what, asshole," Meguire said. "You want him out so bad, throw him out. I'll pick him up right now. He'll be in the department inside an hour and in the system before the day's out."

Richard imagined his rice matting inside the bag. The omni-present drizzle was starting to intensify again into rain, rewetting the fabric around his neck. "You want to bluff, don't do it with someone who knows firsthand how piss-poor you gamble," Meguire said. "Help him keep his head down. Don't let him get mixed up in anything for a while. Just… give me time to try to work it out on my end."

"Why are you breaking a sweat over this?"

"I got bigger things on my plate than spending tax dollars ousting a kid from a good foster assignment just because it's not on the books. One way or another, we got nothing on him yet. Until we do, I'm just as happy skipping the middleman."

God damn it. Richard let go of the car and fisted the damp hair off his neck. "I'm heading back in," Meguire said. "Try to take it easy. I'll get back to you if anything pops up over the case."

He wondered how much paperwork it'd be to go back and finish the job Maya had started over at the construction site. Probably at least a few pages. "Is my check in the mail yet?"

"You're welcome for your lunch," Meguire said, and left Richard behind in a puff of exhaust that quickly dissipated in the rain.

… the teriyaki was actually pretty good cold.